Dennis Mongrain swings his surfboard around in the water, points himself toward shore and starts paddling. As the wave lifts his board, he jumps to his feet and begins to skirt across its smooth, arching surface. His face brightens with a broad smile. It's a moment of joy and peace, something akin to a religious experience for Mongrain, who should know about such things because he is a Roman Catholic priest. "I really look forward to getting out there," Mongrain said at the rectory of St.

A reader named Chris wrote that in his grandfather's attic he found a paper American Express card. He wanted to know if it was old or valuable. We talked to the archivist at American Express and learned that the very first American Express credit card was issued Oct. 1, 1958. It was made of paperboard. More than 500,000 were issued by the end of the year, each for a fee of $6. On May 1, 1959, the paper was replaced with a purple plastic card that was used for the next 10 years.

NOW you can stir your coffee like they do at El Bulli, with a specially designed "coffee spoon" created for chef Ferran Adria -- it's the same stirrer used at Adria's restaurant outside of Barcelona, but you need not travel farther than Santa Monica to get one. Jing Tio, owner of culinary supply boutique Le Sanctuaire, is importing a collection of flatware called Faces Ferran Adria by Design Mix Collections, a company collaborating with the renowned chef.

There are probably a million and one ways to break into show business, but nobody, before Bob Wieland, had ever done it by running the New York City marathon on his arms. Wieland, 41, lost both his legs nearly 20 years ago when he stepped on an 82-millimeter booby trap while trying to drag a wounded soldier from a battlefield in Vietnam.

Dear Skeeter, Thanks for the crate of grapefruit. They're pink, sweet and luscious. But frankly they've caused a certain level of dissension. Leni might blame it on me, but believe me, it isn't my fault. One of the worst things about having young kids around is that it makes it so tough to act like a 4-year-old yourself. I mean I'm a slow waker in the morning. The other day was typical.

The tinkle of tableware--ah, music to a cook's ear. And a kind of music you can hear whenever there's a bit of wind, if you get one of these wind chimes made from antique silver-plated ware. They're designed to be hung indoors or out; polish occasionally with silver polish. Artist Ted Shields, by the way, is a retired FBI agent. Culinary Chimes, $48 to $50, at Feast, Pasadena; Imp, Santa Monica; Z Galleria, Beverly Center; and Nordstrom, various locations.

Yes, we all know great cooks who never measure an ingredient and everything they make comes out perfect. Most of us, however, would be courting disaster if we started throwing in a pinch of this and a handful of that. Precise measurements not only assure consistent results, they sometimes can make the difference between the success or failure of a recipe. We're limiting this discussion to the tools most commonly used to measure ingredients in recipes developed for American consumers.

Some anecdotes about students' misspellings occasioned a note from elementary school teacher Suzanne Covert-Hein of Santa Clarita. She once asked her sixth-graders, "In what historical period would you most like to live?" One of her students wrote very neatly, "I'd like to live in the Silverware." Covert-Hein added: "It took me a long time before I figured out he meant the Civil War." SPLIT DECISION: Covert-Hein has had adventures with her own name.

I DON'T LIKE being touched by strangers. And by "strangers," I mean anyone I'm not having sex with. I don't like massages, I don't like hugs, I don't even like to high-five. I just don't see the point. Either we're going to do it, or we're not. And, as I've learned the hard way after overreacting to a cheek kiss, apparently we're not. So, as a radical form of immersion therapy, I drove to an office building in West L.A. on a Friday night to pay $30 to cuddle with strangers for four hours.

November 22, 2005 | Dean Bakopoulos, DEAN BAKOPOULOS' novel, "Please Don't Come Back from the Moon," about the disappearances of unemployed men in a working-class Detroit suburb, will be released in paperback by Harcourt in January.

THE AMERICAN auto industry is dead. With General Motors announcing, days before Thanksgiving, 30,000 more layoffs and nine plant closings, the Rust Belt just got the final strike of the sledgehammer. When GM finally goes down for good, all the rusted remains of that region will crumble. My grandfather was a UAW man who slapped dashboards into Mustangs at the Ford Rouge plant just outside Detroit; my grandmother sweated out the first shift at Cabot tool and die.